Cuba's first Internet connection

Jesus Martinez (l) and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf

Cuba's first Internet connection was made in September 1996. CENIAI, the National Center of Automated Data Exchange, installed and managed the link. As was the custom in those days, CENIAI Director Jesus Martinez sent an email to his colleagues in the networking community announcing the connection. It read:

From: Director CENIAI/ Jesus Martinez/IDICT
To: enredo@conicit.ve
CC: jemar@amauta.rcp.net.pe
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 20:22:41 -0300 (EDT)

Dear friends,

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "Cayman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired. We have a 64 Kbps link to Sprint in the U.S.

Many friends helped us and it would be unfair to mention some because of the risk of overlooking others. To be honest, major recognition goes to the Forum of Latin American and Caribbean Networks, first convened in Rio and most recently held in Lima. The Forum gave us the opportunity to meet, share strategies and estimate the size of our tasks to better plan our work. The Forum helped us achieve our connection to the Internet through technical teaching and solidarity.

Our greatest thanks go to my young colleagues at CENIAI, who had full confidence in our ability to make this historic connection.

A new era has just begun for us. We will soon announce our Web site and value-added services to do as much as we can to help develop our region and our culture.

A good Caribbean greeting,
Jesus

(The Forum Martinez refers to was a group of network leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean who held annual meetings sponsored by the Organization of American States and the US National Science Foundation).

I'm posting Martinez' announcement because it conveys the spirit of the small, international networking community he belonged to. He thanks The Forum for their assistance and solidarity. They did more than meet annually -- they collaborated year around using their new tools like email, threaded discussion, file transfer, Gopher (a limited, text-based precursor to the Web), remote login and eventually the Web. They were among the first to form what networking visionary J. C. R. Licklider had predicted thirty years earlier -- a community "not of common location, but of common interest."

Martinez was clearly proud of Cuba, but he also shared the values and enthusiasm of the international networking community, who believed, correctly, that the Internet would profoundly impact individuals, organizations and society. Cuba (CENIAI) had been among the leaders in pre-Internet networking. They came to the Internet a little late, but were confident of their ability to help develop the region and culture.

That ambition has been achieved to varying degrees around the world, but Cuba has fallen far behind. That's the bad news. The good news is that times are changing, and Cuba has a well educated population ready to use, shape and be shaped by the Internet. When the time comes, they will bring a Cuban perspective to the task, and will develop and use it in Cuban ways.

For example, Cuba has invested in medical education and health care for years and they are poor -- might that prepare them to invent new applications and devices for low-cost, decentralized medicine? Or, might they show us ways to fund the development of the Internet without heavy reliance on advertising and consumer sales?

Yes, I know I am being a Pollyanna, but humor me -- Martinez' vision will eventually be realized.

---

Much of the early history of Latin American networking is captured at the Network Pioneer site. You can browse the site or focus on The Forum or on Martinez' contribution. Links to reports of the seven annual Forum meetings are here.

For a short article on CENIAI written four years before their Internet connection, see Press, L. and Snyder, J., A Look at Cuban Networks.

Here is Martinez' email in Spanish.

From: Director CENIAI/ Jesus Martinez/IDICT 
To: enredo@conicit.ve
CC: jemar@amauta.rcp.net.pe
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 1996 20:22:41 -0300 (EDT)

Queridos amigos;

Despues de tantos dias, annos, de sacrificio y desvelo, tengo la gran
satisfacion de comunicarles que nuestra querida Cuba, nuestro caiman
antillano ha podido ser conectada a INTERNET como habiamos deseado.
La conexion a 64 Kbps por el momento, se realiza a Sprint en E.U.

Muchos son los amigos que nos han ayudado, apoyado y seria injusto el
mencionar a alguien sin correr el riesgo de olvidar algun nombre, creo que
para ser honesto mi mayor reconocimiento lo voy a dirigir al FORO DE REDES
LATINOAMERICANAS Y DEL CARIBE,desde Rio hasta Lima. El FORO que nos dio la
oportunidad de conocernos, de compartir estrategias, de dimensionar
nuestras tareas, de proyectar mejor nuestras misiones y nos ensenno que
lograr conectarse a Internet no se hace solo con la tecnica, tambien se
hace con solidaridad.

Nuestro mayor agradecimiento a mi joven colectivo de CENIAI, que ha
confiado plenamente en nosotros y que ha sabido concretar este hecho.
historico.

Una nueva etapa acaba de comenzar para nosotros, pronto comenzaran ha
conocer de nuestros WWW y de nuestros servicios de valor agregado, de
nuestra realidad y de lo mucho que podemos ayudar al desarrollo de
nuestra region y de nuestra cultura.

Un saludo bien Caribenno.

Jesus

-----
Update 4/4/2016

In a chat with some friends last week, Jesus described events surrounding that first Internet connection. Their goal was to connect on his birthday, July 22, but finalizing the agreement with Sprint and testing took longer than expected. The actual connection was made on the afternoon of August 22. Jesus was out of the office in the morning and when he returned the workers were waiting with the news that they were online -- it was a "great thing that one can never forget."

-----
Update 4/7/2016

My friend Luis Germán Rodríguez found a Wired Magazine article on the Cuban Internet, published about a year and a half after their connection was established. It includes a visit to CENIAI and an interview with Jesus Martinez (below) in which he says that "The problem of the Internet in Cuba has never been technical or economic. As in any country, it's 70 percent political."

-----
Update 8/23/2016

Jesus Martinez has sent a note commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Cuba's connection to the Internet. In it he notes a number of achievements during that time, but he acknowledges the connectivity gap between Cuba and other nations in the region and calls for the use of technology by and for the benefit of all -- "the last mile is not the business, home or individual, these are the very first mile".

You can download a copy of Jesus' 20th anniversary note (shown above) and his original Internet connection announcement twenty years ago, here.

-----
Update 8/25/2016

Jesus sent me a couple more dates leading up to the 20th anniversary.

In November 1994 He and a colleague spent a month in Montevideo, where, among other things, they set up a Gopher server with Cuban information -- they were "on the Internet" without being on the Internet.

Jesus requested a class B address block in late December, 1994.

On January 12, 1995 Internic assigned Cuba the 169.158.0.0/16 block, with CENIAI as the administrator.

One more point -- ETECSA, not the US National Science Foundation (NSF), paid Sprint for the initial satellite connection. As I recall, NSF solicited bids for their international connection program and Sprint won. I would not be surprised if NSF subsidized the program, reducing the cost for ETECSA and all others. Regardless, there was no charge for peering with the NSF backbone.

Finally, Jesus sent me a copy of the October 4, 1996 letter he sent to Sprint saying that they had been awarded their IP address block.

The Cuban Internet -- a look back and looking forward

Does Raúl Castro still fear the Internet? Does he have reason to do so?

I recently attended the 2015 Conference of the Association for the study of the Cuban Economy, where I was on a panel on the future of the Internet in Cuba with two friends who played significant roles in Cuban networking history. A third colleague, Juan Blanco, was in the audience.

Jesus Martinez, Juan Blanco and Óscar Visiedo

Óscar and later Jesus were the directors of CENIAI, the National Center for Automatic Interchange of Information, and were responsible for Cuba's first computer network activity. Juan ran political interference for them -- using his social-political contacts to argue for the adoption of email. (Juan says the debate focused purely on email, ignoring the Usenet News groups).

CENIAI staff, 1990. Photo by Óscar Visiedo, Jesus Martinez second from left in the back row

CENIAI began networking in 1982 with connections to Soviet and European databases and limited email. By 1992, CENIAI had 62 staff members, and was part of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment.

They were not on the Internet, but connected by phone several times a day to exchange batches of email and discussion forum posts. The discussion groups, known collectively as Usenet News, covered a wide variety technical, cultural and political discussion. They were part of an asynchronous global network that used the Unix to Unix copy protocol (UUCP):

UUCP connections, 1988

By 1995, Cuba was among the networking leaders in the Caribbean. CENIAI and three other networks with international UUCP links were transferring over 60 Mbytes of international email and had nearly 2,600 users:

Monthly international email traffic in 1995

Cuba's UUCP connection was to the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) in Canada. APC provided connections for many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and that attracted the attention of politicians, who saw NGOs as subversive. There was debate and the Interior Ministry argued that material sent to and received from APC should be blocked since it could not be controlled.

Juan Blanco argued that the Ministry of the Interior was only concerned with control of communication at the expense of arresting national development, saying that had their view prevailed when Lenin was around there would be no phone system in the USSR. His argument was effective and the UUCP traffic to APC was allowed to continue.

Óscar Visiedo left for the United States and Jesus Martinez took over as director. Under his leadership, CENIAI established their first Internet connection, a 64 kbps IP link to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) backbone. The cost was born by the NSF International connections program, which connected academic and research networks from 28 nations.

Martinez and his colleagues were proud and happy to be on the Internet, but the Internet was no longer under the radar. In June, 1996, the Executive Committee of the Cuban Council of Ministers issued Decree 209 regulating the use and development of information networks and Internet services within Cuba. The decree established an inter-ministerial commission with responsibility for all matters relating to access to and the information on computer networks of global reach. The commission was to be chaired by the Minister of Metallurgical Industry and Electronics and include Ministries of Science, Technology and Environment, Communications, Interior, Revolutionary Armed Forces and Justice. Many interests were represented.

It appears that power was consolidated in January 2000, when Decree Law 204 created the current Ministry of Informatics and Communications (MIC) with control over Information technology, the electronics industry, telecommunications, broadcasting, radio spectrum and the postal service – traditional media and computer networks.

Today, the Cuban Internet is far less developed than would be expected in a nation with Cuba's level of education and development. This is due to the embargo, the poor economy at the time of Cuba's connection to the Internet and government fear. All three must change for the Cuban Internet to thrive.

The fear was based in part on the collapse of the Soviet Union. In October 1997, Raúl Castro said:

Glasnost, which undermined the USSR and other socialist countries, consisted in handing over the mass media, one by one, to the enemies of socialism.

In a 1995 interview, Cuban researcher Gillian Gunn noted that since the spring of 1993, there had been Cuban government memos calling for increased audit and control of NGOs and Raúl Castro commented on her report, noting that NGOs were a threat.

The Cubans may also have been aware of the role of the global UUCP network in thwarting the 1991 Soviet Coup attempt against Gorbachev.

In spite of these reservations, there was debate within Cuba. Óscar Visiedo demonstrated the network for Fidel Castro, who he says was positive. (Fidel inaugurated the Youth Computer Clubs). At the same time as Raúl Castro spoke out against the Internet, pragmatic Finance Minister (?) Carlos Lage reiterated Juan Blanco's view, saying:

One telex can cost twelve dollars [whereas] the same message costs 75 cents in the form of a fax and 3 cents via the Internet ... in spite of our blockaded circumstances, we are in a relatively good position [to face the challenges of such scientific and technological changes], due to the educational and scientific work developed by the revolution.

This time the hard liners prevailed, deciding to limit access to the Internet, but today US support for the embargo is declining, the Cuban economy is in better shape than it was in 1996 and it will improve further post December 17. One issue remains -- does Raúl Castro still fear the Internet? Does he have reason to do so?

Yoani's iPhone and Jesus' vision

Someone sent me a link to Can the Internet Bring Change to Cuba?, an article published in the New York Review of Books by Daniel Wilkinson.

Wilkinson posits that since the dissident blogs are seldom read in Cuba, their major impact is on the Cuban exile community, whose leaders have largely shaped US policy. He also credits them for being moderate -- not calling for the overthrow of the government, criticizing the US embargo, etc. Instead, he says, they tell stories of life in Cuba.

Wilkinson quotes several such stories told by bloggers, and the one that caught my eye and heart was posted by Yoani Sánchez, who, after seeing an iPhone surf the Web for the first time, wrote:

Between the walls of this house, that had heard dozens of Cubans talk of the Internet as if it were a mythical and difficult to reach place, this little technological gadget gave us a piece of cyberspace. We, who throughout the Blogger Academy, work on a local server that simulates the web, were suddenly able to feel the kilobytes run across the palms of our hands. I had the desperate desire to grab Rosa Díez’s iPhone and run off with it to hide in my room and surf all the sites blocked on the national networks. For a second, I wanted to keep it so I could enter my own blog, which is still censored in the hotels and cybercafés. But I returned it, a bit disconsolate I confess.

This quote immediately reminded me of the 1996 message Jesus Martinez sent to his colleagues in the then small global Internet community announcing Cuba's connection to the Net. Jesus felt the same power as Yoani, writing:

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired...A new era has just begun for us. We will soon announce our Web site and value-added services to do as much as we can to help develop our region and our culture.

I hope Yoani gets a 4G iPhone and Jesus' vision is realized soon.

---

PS Yoani wrote that her blog was blocked in Cuba, but sometime later, Reuters announced that it had been un-blocked -- does anyone have a sense of how widely the blogs of Yoani and other dissidents are read and known in Cuba?

When Cubans and Americans have cooperated

Sprint, a U.S. corporation with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, provided Cuba's first Internet link.

Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, praised Cuba for their contribution to the fight against ebola during a panel discussion at the ebola crisis at the Manhattan headquarters of Thomson Reuters.

She just returned from a fact finding trip to West Africa and said of Cuba

I think they announced that going on almost two months ago, And they are sending another 200 on top of that 265. That is a big gap and a big need.

She also said it gave her great pride

To see these Americans or Europeans or Cubans or whoever it is in their full protective gear, in the scorching heat, working two-hours shifts, because that’s all you can tolerate being in that suit.

When the moderator asked a leading question about US relations with Cuba, she answered

There’s no integrated effort, in part because the UN is doing the command and control. But we’re very grateful to them for doing this.

Below, you see two Cuban doctors at the largest of 17 ebola treatment units (ETUs) in Liberia, which will be mainly operated by Cuban doctors and nurses. It is noteworthy that the picture was posted on the Voice of America Web site and funding is from USAID.

I'm posting this in a blog on the Internet in Cuba because it reminds me of the collaboration and friendship of Cuban and American networking technicians during the pre and early-Internet days.

The day Cuba established its first IP connection to the Internet, Jesus Martinez, Director of Cuba's National Center of Automated Data Exchange (CENIAI), the organization responsible for networking at that time posted a statement saying

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired. We have a 64 Kbps link to Sprint in the U.S.

Sprint, a U.S. corporation, subsidized by funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, provided Cuba's first Internet link.

At that time, American networnkers were welcome visitors at CENIAI and at Cuba's Informatica conference and Cubans and Americans and others attended and taught in the Internet Society's annual Developing Country Workshops and conferences. There was no politics and no big money, just a common belief in the importance of the Internet.

Martinez and his colleagues were not politicians seeking power or representatives of corporations seeking monopoly profits, they were technicians and others who believed that computer networks were fascinating and held great potential for improving the world. They may have been naive, but one has to respect them and we owe the same to any medical professional coming to West Africa to treat ebola patients.

Cuban doctors and USAID in Liberia

Jesus Maritnez and Internet pioneer Vint Cerf

CENIAI staff, 1990

American visitors at CENIAI

Internet Society Developing Nations Workshop, 1993

-----
Update 11/12/2014

Wall Street columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady says Havana earns almost $8 billion a year off the backs of the health workers it sends to poor countries. She says Cuba is well paid for sending doctors abroad and the doctors themselves get very little. O'Grady calls this "slave trade," which sounds like click bait, and Listening to the interview, it seems that a lot of her conclusions are speculative. You can see the interview for yourself here:



If you are a Wall Street Journal subscriber, you can read her column here.

A reader of this blog, who is a Cuba-trained physician now living in the US, has told me Cuban doctors are eager to go abroad because there is nothing for them to do in Cuba. O'grady paints a different picture. I have no reliable way to form an opinion -- just passing these links along.

-----
Update 5/8/2015

Americans and Cubans collaborated in the early days of the Internet and during the Ebola epidemic. Ebola killed thousands and it (literally) decimated the tiny health-care workforces of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

In a Foreign Affairs article, Laurie Garrett proposes combining the resources of the US and Cuba's Latin American Medical School (ELAM) in training medical professionals.

Combining the money, logistics, and talent of the United States, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia to rapidly train a team of new doctors for the West African nations offers the most cost-effective, swift, and appropriate means to solve the health systems crisis faced in the Ebola-hit countries.

If you are not familiar with ELAM, watch this TED Talk by Gail Reed. (I have read charges that ELAM graduates do not pass exams at the same rate as those of US medical schools, but ELAM is devoted to training healthcare workers to deliver care that is appropriate to developing nations).

As the Ebola epidemic showed us, this is a global problem, not an African problem.

Sprint connected Cuba in 1996, how about 2016?

Does Sprint have an advantage over other US companies?

Journalist Mark Walsh (@markfwal) sent me an interesting conjecture -- perhaps Sprint is well positioned to play a role in Cuba's mobile connectivity. He pointed out that Sprint already offers cell phone roaming in Cuba and their CEO, Marcelo Claure, seems like he might be a natural for dealing with Cuba. (Verizon also offers roaming in Cuba).

Claure was born in Bolivia and founded Brightstar, a Miami-based distributor of wireless devices in 1997. Today Brightstar designs, manufactures and distributes wireless equipment and offers services to 200 mobile network operators, 40,000 retailers, and 15,000 enterprise customers in over 50 nations, 20 of which are in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Birghtstar was bought by SoftBank, which also owns 80% of Sprint, and Claure became CEO of Sprint in 2014.

So Claure is from Latin America, has done business in Cuba and other Latin American nations and has ties to Miami and, doubtless, the Cuban community there. On top of all of that, he is active in promoting professional soccer.

The final hint is historical. In the 1990s, the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) had an International Connectivity Program (ICP), which connected research and education networks in many developing nations.

The ICP provided access to the Internet by linking foreign networks to NSFNET, the NSF backbone network in the US. The ICP funded Cuba's first Internet connection, providing a link from the US to Cuba's National Center for Automated Information Exchange (CENIAI), which also had non-Internet links to Russia and Canada.

You may have guessed by now -- that link was provided by Sprint, under contract to the NSF. As Jesus Martinez, the head of CENIAI at the time, put it:

After so many days, years of sacrifice and vigilance, I have great satisfaction to announce that our beloved Cuba, our "caiman of the Indies," has been connected to the Internet as we had desired. We have a 64 Kbps link to Sprint in the U.S.

You might be surprised to read that Cuba was allowed to connect to a US network over a link provided by a US company -- what about the embargo? Steve Goldstein, who headed the ICP, says the program was authorized by the government:

In the case of Cuba, we applied for a license to route its traffic on the NSFNET backbone and in the (NSF regional networks) from the Department of the Treasury, which administers the Trading with the Enemy Act. Treasury coordinated it with State and other government agencies, as did Commerce when we asked for advisory opinions about Russia, for example.

Well, what do you think? Does Sprint have an advantage over other US companies? Would they be able to compete successfully against Chinese companies that are already in Cuba?

Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure signing a roaming agreement with ETECSA

-----
Update 2/27/2016

Armando Camacho has translated this post into Spanish on his blog Carpe Diem.

CENIAI staff photo taken in 1990

CENIAI -- The Center for Automatic Interchange of Information -- was Cuba's networking link to the Soviet bloc during the pre-Internet days. The CENIAI staff understood the potential importance of networking for Cuba and were enthusiastic members of the international networking community.

This photo, showing many members of the CENIAI staff, was taken on the malecón in Havana in 1990 by Oscar Visiedo who was director of CENIAI at the time. You can see Oscar's proud comments and the names of the people by following this link to Oscar Visiedo's Facebook page. (Jesus Martinez, who was CENIAI Director six years later when Cuba connected to the Internet, is second from the left in the back row).

This was taken six years before CENIAI got their first IP connection to the Internet.

These were the Cuban Internet pioneers.